State school admissions drop at Oxford

The number of state school students admitted to Oxford has fallen this year despite the university's efforts to shed its elitist image.

Figures for successful candidates who have been made offers to start in October this year are not due to be published until December, but will come as a severe embarrassment to the university, which has been under attack from Labour ministers since the Laura Spence affair three years ago.

Then the chancellor Gordon Brown said it was "an absolute scandal" that the Tyneside comprehensive pupil had been turned down by Magdelen College to study medicine - a claim vehemently disputed by Oxford ever since. But this year, Charles Clarke, the education secretary, returned to the theme by urging some universities to shed their Brideshead Revisited image and announcing his scheme for an access regulator - the office for fair access - designed to win over Labour MPs to tuition fees in return for cracking down on any bias towards independent schools.

The complex arrangements at Oxford and Cambridge, where the individual colleges handle admissions, are expected to come under renewed scrutiny.

Oxford has been making efforts to attract more state school applicants and last year the number offered places rose from 1,855 to 1,955. This year, however, there has been a significant fall in offers to 1,781. Over the same three-year period the total number of offers to independent school candidates remained virtually constant - 1,529 in 2001, 1,536 in 2002 and 1,522 this year.

The university today confirmed the figures, but said it could be misleading to release figures halfway through the process. However, the total is likely to go down rather than up - not all candidates offered places will achieve the necessary A-level grades and a few might decide to go elsewhere.

In a statement, the university said: "Oxford has a robust admissions procedure that selects students solely on the basis of academic merit and potential, regardless of background, and so the offer figures in any one year depend solely on that year's applicants.

"The number of offers we make to students from the maintained sector has been rising annually for many years. Although this trend has not been followed this year, we have nonetheless made significantly more offers to maintained sector applicants than to independent applicants, as we do every year."

The statement added: "Oxford University works very hard both to ensure the fairness of our admissions procedures and to encourage more bright maintained- sector students to apply. Something that people may forget is that, partly as a consequence of our outreach work, the number of applications we receive goes up every single year - so every year it does get that bit more competitive for everyone."